Running a first RPG campaign

Having just taken a group of players through the D&D starter campaign - The Lost Mine of Phandelver - and reaching the end of the module*, I thought I would sit back and reflect upon the experience. This will not be a particularly structured post, but hopefully will bring up some points which might inspire future blog musings, and generate some ideas for improving as a game master.

It was my first time as a GM and, at the beginning the campaign, still pretty unsure of the intricacies of the D&D 5e ruleset beyond the basic skill dice-rolling system and a rough understanding of combat. Now, twenty sessions on, I still don't know much beyond what you might find in the quick reference PDF, but I feel a lot more relaxed about that. There have been plenty of occasions where I have felt able to just say, "let's flip a (virtual) coin for it". 

This mainly worked thanks to a splendid group of players who, all with varying levels of experience, are relaxed about how accurately the slightly more obscure rules were applied. Having not organised the oft-recommended Session 0, pretty much anything could have happened. This group is made up simply by the first few people to respond to an ad I put up on a Discord channel. Six strangers with nothing else in common but for a hankering to end the life of some imaginary goblins.

Internet, you bring much strife to the world but by golly, you are a marvel.

Despite the presence of many horror stories about internet-based RPG groups, these players have all played together amicably, and even managed a bit of PC-on-PC conflict whilst remaining amicable out of character. They all reliably showed up throughout the campaign, barring the odd interjection of real life, with only one falling off the grid after a good six months' worth of sessions. We have recruited two more random strangers online to join in and carry on the adventure for perhaps a few sessions more.

It is the players who make a campaign succeed as much as it is the GM - it is they, after all, who grant the GM the 'right' to make a ruling and carry the story on. The world's greatest GM would only be able to run a very poor adventure if their players took no notice of their storytelling.

So, as much as anything else, my thanks go out to my players.

The Lost Mine of Phandelver, from my experience, is a good campaign for those GMs with a propensity for over-preparation. It's divided into suitable chapters, each of which, after a read through of the whole adventure, can be read and digested separately on an individual basis so that the aspiring game master doesn't feel overwhelmed at the prospect of mass information retention.

What it could do with, though, is some advice for the newbie GM on how to cater for larger or smaller groups. I had five players saunter through most of the first two chapters, until I decided to go through the rest of the maps on Roll20 and add more monsters to provide a bit more of a challenge. I also had to up the power levels of the various boss fights ** to rescue the conclusion of various chapters from being anticlimatic duds. I have since discovered a tool which might have made life a bit easier.

The five players created their own characters for this campaign, discussing amongst themselves possible backstories and coming up with a group of drop outs from a travelling circus. Interestingly, none were human and every single of one of them had darkvision. One wonders how much easier this made the adventure as a whole, what with the odds of being ambushed underground having been drastically reduced.

Combat and skill checks, after some initial teething issues, have proved nice and simple to work through. I'm happy with going on in the same vein in future campaigns. With regards to role playing and narration, however, I feel there is plenty of room for improvement. From little things like noting which voices I've improvised for which individuals, to shifting from NPCs as quest-giving devices to characters in their own rights - I think my role playing was adequate but not great.

Narration has improved over the sessions, but I need some prompts to make sure I go beyond sight and sound. Also some thesaurus reading, because I really need some more ways to describe the rustling of leaves in a breeze.

Overall, though, the campaign has (so far) been fun and enjoyable. I'll see how well these post-LMoP modules go before making any decisions about going homebrew- or module-based next time round.


* I would say conclusion, but having done exceedingly well all the way up to the last scene of the campaign, the party were unable to stop the arch villain from escaping, a variation the module itself does not take into account. So we are still going, now unfettered and unguided by a game designer's advice.

** Though even that can fall by the wayside if you can't pass a Wisdom save - in one gaming session which included the supposedly tough goblinoid boss of a keep I failed 14 out of 19 Wisdom saves, leaving all my toughest combatants either frozen in place or fighting for the wrong side...)

Humanities Professor

Another long-owned-but-never-painted figure, this one was either a birthday or Christmas present and has sat untouched for a long time.

I had intended for him to be an Indiana Jones-esque academic, so obviously he needed a hat. The selection on the Perry Civil War soldier sprue proved to be close enough in scale - I snipped one off and crammed it on the scalped head.

I experimented with a more wash-based approach on this fellow's clothes, which I don't think have been captured particularly well by my phone's camera. Perhaps the trousers need another layer of highlights. In person, however, I'm satisfied that they look sufficiently 'posh professor' for my purposes, if perhaps a tad bright. It was another use for the sepia wash, of which I am becoming particularly fond.

The Laden Traveller

I have had this chap sitting in my to-do pile for a good while now - he was part of my first order from Hasslefree Miniatures, all the way back in October 2013.

He has been given a range of different right arms, from his original pistol to cricket bats, before I finally settled upon configuring him as a character of indeterminate battle-readiness. His new arm comes from the Studio Miniatures zombie sprue - one of the few unarmed right hands I could find.

I'm still not particularly happy with the glasses, though I feel these fleshtone lenses work better than the white ones I've given some of the earlier miniatures.

More rebasings

Sleeping, database management, travelling on public transport - all these things are made more unpleasant with this heat (honest, Great Western Railways, where are your trains with functioning air conditioning?). To this list I add painting. No matter how wet my palette, the paint dries on the brush and the miniature before I can spread it across. I have spent half my painting time scraping off lumpy layers of paint with my fingernail over and over again.

Progress is therefore even slower than usual on the painting front.

So, back to rebasing the back catalogue of zombie hunters with a view to utilising them in some modern pulp games:

Terraced Prototypes.

I have found that constructing terrain is still a slog - I do not have the same degree of patience for it as with painting. I have a TTCombat suburban house in progress, and a set of apartments still in their wrapping, and I am hit by a wave of lethargy whenever I sit down at my desk, wood glue in hand. I am a child of my generation - I need terrain quickly and easily.

So, still faced with a surplus of business cards, I tried to design some more basic terrain.

The previous efforts have sufficed for the last few months, but they are a little too abstract for my liking, and having had our watertank burst above us and flooded us out of our bedroom at the beginning of the new year, I have a newfound dislike of flat roofs.

Hence, this time around, I have experimented with a design more commonly seen on British streets:

Please excuse the poor photography distortion - they are the same size!

These two terraced houses are my prototypes. I used the same doors, windows and brickwork as before, and flipped the business cards to vertical, adding a bit more of a presence on the tabletop and allowing the impression of an extra floor. The roofs overlap and in theory just sit comfortably on top, pattern taken from what I believe was a free stock picture online.

A key design choice this time round was to do away with the interior, which I judged to be a luxury I could do without. I have so very seldom used the insides because the original business card houses were just too small to even abstractly portray an intern scuffle between minis, and I figured that abandoning one design feature would allow me to try another one:

As fortunate as I am to have a hobby space to myself, it has very quickly filled up, and therefore I am on an economy drive. Fold-flat buildings are therefore a Good Thing.

These took me about an hour and a half to put together, the second much quicker than the first. Now that's a time commitment I can cope with.

Office Workers

There has been an extended break in blog posts, linked primarily to D&D-related distractions which have taken up two of my weekday evenings - leaving me with Fridays and weekends for other hobbies, and we have managed to fill our weekends up with a lot of real life stuff of late.

However, with one D&D campaign recently coming to an end, I have an extra slot after work free to return to tabletop affairs!

I have started rebasing (again) my collection, opting for very economical plastic binding sheets. The tests I ran them through indicated their flexibility might result in fewer occasions to glue a figure back to its stand. It has also held better to miniatures with a smaller foot surface area.

Thus, I am now working through my old zombie apocalypse minis, touching up the various knocks and scrapes they have accumulated over time as well. There are a couple of paint jobs which have not stood the test of time particularly well, but they will do for now. They were originally made at a time when I was far more interested in trying alternative combinations of plastic survivor parts, avoiding the plethora of gun options in favour of more British-like homemade weapons.

The Administrator

The Sports Psychologist

The Executive

Dungeon Delving Distractions

I have found myself distracted from tabletop miniatures-related activities in the last few weeks, but seeing as this blog was intended more or less to chart my geeky journey through life I think it is a suitable enough venue to also document my forays into dungeons and against dragons.

I was introduced to the fantastical world of Dungeons & Dragons by a friend something like a year ago, and over the course of four or five sessions became utterly entranced. I got myself a Player's Handbook and the Monster Manual, pondered multitudinous characters, really psyched myself up.

Then half the gaming group, including the dungeon master, moved away within weeks of each other.

Since then the unscratched itch dulled a little, until stumbling across the 1d6 +3 Kobolds discord channel. 

Now, I had gingerly stepped into the waters of Roll20 trying to find some D&D players online willing to accommodate a newcomer, but had found it next to impossible to find a game happening at a doable hour and then get past the highly competitive audition stage. There just seemed to not be enough suitable games for too many people. I wasn't quite prepared to DM a game of my own until I'd had a refresher of the rules and a crash course on how to use Roll20.

Then I found this discord group aimed specifically at people in the GMT timezone. Finally, I found myself a game, and hurriedly through together a character sheet for a level one Monk, spending far more time on the picture than I did on making an effective character:

I gave him very little in the way of backstory, other than his order:

The Masters of Thyme

The Masters of Thyme are a small order of monks dedicated to providing for the less well-off traveler. Members of the order can usually be found either in order-run taverns on the roadsides of long distance paths, or travelling alone with the aim of learning of and serving the needs of the more unfortunate road users. Members of the order are generally orphaned children from particularly unfortunate journeys, and will train in the ways of the order in the tavern before setting off on travels of their own. 

Masters of Thyme, represented by three circular dashes within a circle within a square, appreciate the value of attaining a state of true meditation, and many initiates train chiefly in the Way of the Cook and the Way of the Wash, utterly shutting out the rest of the world as they go through the ritual of frying or washing & drying. Understandably, they are often able to find free lodging and food at may or the more modest or comfortable inns and taverns.

Now, heartened, I'm preparing to run my first campaign using the official starter pack - The Lost Mine of Phandelver. I bought the pack off Roll20, and am keen to work out my DMing before imposing it upon friends and family in the real world.

All of which has, combined with real life, brought me to realise just how few evenings there are in the week! I haven't ceased miniature-doing completely, but it's definitely going a lot slower.